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Read a Book, Get Out of Jail

In a scuffed-up college classroom in Dartmouth, Mass., 14 people page through a short story by T. C. Boyle. They debate the date at which the action is set: when was the Chevy Bel Air released, and what was the drinking age in New York State that year? They question moral responsibility: when the three friends in the Bel Air assault a girl, should peer pressure be blamed for their impulse, or hormones, drink, sin? To which the man at the head of our table rejoins: “There’s a kind of complexity to human experience that isn’t always recognized. You try to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, but sometimes both are wrong, right?”

Of the 14 people, a dozen are male. One is an English professor, one is a graduate student, two are judges and two are probation officers. The eight othersare convicted criminalswho have been granted probation in exchange for attending, and doing the homework for, six twice-monthly seminars on literature. The class is taught through Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club. At each two-hour meeting, students discuss fiction, memoirs and the occasional poem; authors range from Frederick Douglass to John Steinbeck to Toni Morrison, topics from self-­mutilation and family quarrels to the Holocaust and the Montgomery bus boycott.

Robert Waxler, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and the man at the head of the table, founded the reading program in 1991 with Superior Court Judge Robert Kane and Wayne Saint Pierre, a probation officer; since then, it has expanded to eight other states. Led by literature professors, the program has brought thousands of convicts to college campuses even as the withdrawal of Pell grants from prisoners (who were ruled ineligible for federal college financing in 1994) drove a wedge between the two state-funded institutions where young adults do time. Meanwhile, rehabilitative reading has spread from Waxler’s original all-male seminar to similar women-only and mixed-sex groups, to one-time experiments like the seminar on “The Road Not Taken” to which a Vermont judge last year sentenced 28 young partyers who broke into Robert Frost’s old house, leaving a trail of booze and vomit. Picture “Remembrance of Things Past” as a literary ankle bracelet that keeps you chained to the desk for months.

The terms Waxler uses at the opening session have one foot in literary criticism and another in psychotherapy: “exploration,” “ambiguity,” “journeying.” But new-age gerunds give way to old-fashioned imperatives when the professor hands off to the probation officer: good cop, bad cop. Or rather, ambivalent cop.

“I don’t want to be all negative,” the officer begins, “but you have to read this book.” Not as in “This is a must-read,” but “We’ve had people go to jail for not reading.”

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Credit
Illustration by Paul Sahre

Any schoolchild knows there’s nothing new about required reading. But since the Vietnam draft ended, college professors like me have rarely had the obligation, or the opportunity, to hand bad students over to the secular arm. One instructor, Terri Hasseler of Bryant University in Rhode Island, pauses to search for a euphemism before explaining that “it’s a condition of their . . . situation that they have to do the reading.”

Changing Lives Through Literature looks less exotic when you remember how many probation sentences require attendance at 12-step programs. There, too, stories provide a catalyst — with the difference that in Waxler’s program, the narratives belong to fictional characters, not to participants themselves. Here, oversharers are politely cut off; one man whispers the rest of an autobiographical anecdote to the guy next to him, another waits for the break. Yet the professor talks of “working through,” and as I listen to the words students use to describe literary characters, it’s hard not to hear echoes of time spent in rehab: “He made some bad choices.” “She hadn’t figured out a healthy way to deal with the problem.” “He hit bottom before he realized that it just wasn’t him.”

Oprah’s Book Club has taught us all to reduce (or elevate) books to prompts for cathartic discussion of childhood traumas, relationship conflicts and self-esteem deficits. Like Oprah’s reading list, the program’s canon is dominated by fiction and memoir. But the demographics of the program differ substantially from your average book club, which is disproportionately white and even more disproportionately female and middle-class. Even without uniforms, it’s easy to tell who’s a student and who’s an official. The course depends, however, on suspending those differences. “The stories serve as a mirror for everyone,” Waxler told me, “not just the offenders ­— the professors, the probation officers, the judge.” The average court official is more literate than the average convict, but not necessarily more literary: for the judge, too, classroom discussion can be a revelation.

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Reading has always provided a lifeline for prisoners, whether for utilitarian purposes or for spiritual searching. (In 2006, when Beard v. Banks upheld a prison’s right to deny inmates access to printed matter, religious and legal texts were among those excepted.) A broader literary tradition stretching from medieval English dream visions to Solzhenitsyn’s novels situates the most intense and uninterrupted reading in prison. (Waxler points out that “cell” can refer to the space in which monks write as easily as to a room in jail.) Traditionally, books have offered virtual escape from physical confinement. In alternative sentencing programs, though, books provide a more literal alternative to incarceration; and the authorities’ job is not to censor books, but to supply them.

It’s easy to dismiss the program as utopian, or worse. Waxler reports being berated by parents paying college tuition for the same classes that felons receive free. If the program works, its economic logic is unassailable: running it costs roughly $500 a head, Waxler says, as opposed to about $30,000 for a year of incarceration. But that’s a big if. The most conclusive study, which shows program participants achieving half the recidivism rate of a control group, involved fewer than 100 people. More important, the literacy level needed to participate makes its population a self-selecting one, and even among those students with the skills to participate, many never make it to the final session. On the day I attended, one man missed class because his halfway house had imposed lockdown, another because a new conviction had landed him back in jail.

“Poetry,” W. H. Auden once wrote, “makes nothing happen.” But Waxler insists that “literature can make a difference” — more specifically, that lives are touched by printed art as they can’t be by the act of sitting around a table arguing about a movie, a song, a self-help book or one’s own childhood. The probation officer begins by telling participants that “this program isn’t a miracle,” but it works in mysterious ways. Perhaps reading stories allows participants to form narratives (whether conscious or not) about their own past and future. In a study of more traditional 12-step programs, the criminologist Shadd Maruna has argued that recovery from addiction requires the ability to distinguish a “before” from an “after.” Searching for terms to explain the mechanism by which literature “changes” readers, participants come up with “turning points,” “epiphanies,” even “grace.” “When it’s working,” Waxler says, “this discussion has a kind of magic to it.”

There’s nothing surprising about the idea that certain books teach lessons, whether the Bible or “The Last Lecture.” Here, though, the medium becomes the message: the act of reading changes — or, as we used to say, converts — the reader, even when the texts being read contain no explicit moral injunctions. Like Sunday school pupils, graduates of Changing Lives Through Literature are given a book along with their diploma. It hardly matters that the traditional leatherette Bible is replaced by a sleek black volume from the Library of America.

Leah Price is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of “The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel.”